Attention Firiona Vie AFK Bazaar Bots!

Oooooh, I like that angle! Great job linking the whole affair to the only activity that DBG is regulating!

It looks like the only thing at issue here is the possibility/likelihood that some people are using software to gain an advantage.

I do not believe the answer is to ban knowledge and technology, or to ban players. I am not a Luddite, and I don't want to be restricted by people who fear progress.

But I do believe the playing field should be equal: DBG should actively condone this or add it into the game themselves, so that it is available to anybody.

I set up an alt in North Ro today and saw the crew on Tunare selling to Wollems all day. They are all /anon as well. I'm going to check in RCOD later and see if it's the same team.

Its not a fear of change in any way, auto updating would be fine if it were game controlled like you say, however, you keep leaving out the part where the time interval is reasonable to where it doesn't destroy the reason to sell anything. If it updates quickly, items will devalue completely and people wont sell in the bazaar and resort to EC tunnel and auction channel techniques. Which is a regression.

This is false - a dev said on this forum that 3rd party programs that do not use a client side injection are typically safe.

Your second statement is only true as long as people's play session does not feel infringed upon by people using such programs.

Eventually the devs will step in.

Unfortunately, I think that this was the falsest statement in this entire thread.

The pendulum swings both ways. Time will prove me correct.

I believe the update interval is irrelevant, as long as everybody has the same access to it (for instance, if it were built into the game). It's not just irrelevant, locking down the update interval is antithetical to a free market and to ensuring that consumers have access to the lowest prices possible.

Items won't devalue completely, because you (and the other sellers) have a lower limit that you are willing to sell your item for - based on your own investment in the item.

Here's an odd consideration: Let's assume that these sellers have been around for a long time, as indicated by other posts in this thread. Then these sellers have been establishing the price points of these key commodity items for a long time. Which means your own perceived value of these items was actually dictated by these sellers before you even tried to sell any. The actual value, if these "market players" weren't in action, might be much lower.

Not bottomless, just lower until you both decide it's not worth it. That's the point that consumers want to spend at.

I hear things like bazaar enemies and I farmed stuff to undercut somebody out of spite and I laugh. Lol I hear Abyss doesn't spend anytime farming anything.

First we sold 100's and 100's of krono to crash the market and then we undercut everything because it was a rip off and overpriced. I wasn't the only one there were a few different groups.

You cannot undercut my traders or where my krono comes from unless you do it off FV. Who cares about FV anyway? Demand isn't really all the great the only thing keeping prices high were monopolies. I don't even play on FV anymore, it's just a dumping ground.

I think this thread is cute. I think a few are starting to realize the amount of stock I shipped in, prices go down and I just leave them there. They will stay at the lowest point; that is the new price. Who cares about the bazaar bots? If DB was going to do anything about Bots they would clean up TLP.

Prices drop to a point I think is good and I just leave the item. Who cares about selling? If you really have something worth selling like TBL raid I have never had a problem moving it. I just wanted to drive down the market. It's just a game, you guys are being way to serious. There are no camps, everything is a DPS race, there's tons of dead servers to farm on and every 5 months you get enough DBC to transfer for free. You win some you lose some. Happy hunting.

None of those are an issue (not 100% positive on the memory viewer, DBG may have issues with it).
What IS the issue is when this informaton is then AUTOMATICALLY entered into the bazaar bots prices.
i.e. automatically updating part of the EQ game.

That is SPECIFICALLY against the EULA.

"injection" --- it sounds saucy and oh sooooo shady.

I mean its RIGHT THERE OUT IN THE OPEN DEV's i did all your investigating for you, for marr's sake topple that plat farming business......i mean of course its not one of your own dev's running a side thing,

I understand and empathize with those who draw satisfaction from selling items in the bazaar, and that this behavior impacts their gaming experience. I have to say this really benefits the buyer. In the same way, Walmart has risen to the top of the retail world doing precisely what the OP is complaining about. It has become a buyer’s market. And that’s not all bad. It benefits EQ players by making desirable game items more affordable.

I can understand the frustration. I’ve been there. I never sell in the bazaar any more because it ruined my gaming experience. Perhaps you should consider why this behavior concerns you so much, and decide if it’s really worth spending any more of your time on it.

tl;dr I left the bazaar and am happier for it!

After you update the /baz ini file's prices (through whatever means), you save the file, /q to leave game, log back in and voila: all your prices are updated. Perfectly legit.

I'm certainly not saying that nobody is hacking anything to do that last step a little faster without logging off, but it's already very fast without any "injection".

You are still checking prices manually and entering them manually. Really I don't see how what you do is any faster than doing it ingame 1 by 1. Unless you are just haphazardly reducing your prices on items to get them moved. Its more than a little faster when its updating in real time against baz prices that are automatically monitored.

Sure you could update your prices and have it automation with without anything intrusive, but it would not be reliable - you would have to frequently monitor it.

The patterns that OP describes could best by described by one or two programs that both been described by devs as cheating.

I don't care if you use third party programs to bot this game. That is not the issue - the issue is when you interfere with someone else ability to play the game.

You have to draw the line somewhere, and this is it.

100% agree

I like when people try to say that these guys aren't using any illegal programs do these things. It's the same people who think The Rock etc, are that big naturally, just good diet and exercise, never touched roids lol.

Anyways, why not put a second toon in front of the bazaar bot and lower your price, then buy the item from him for next to nothing and profit? Do they have a set minimum or can you just put 10pp for a high price item and the go lower? That could suck for them lol.

I agree, like life, if you are doing something that isn't hurting anyone, go for it. If it effects other people negatively, you have to fix it.

I was just responding to Angahra's statement that "None of those are an issue...". Angahra was saying that how they got the prices from the bazaar was not the issue, and that the issue was how they got the updated prices back into the bazaar.

My comment (starting with "After you update the /baz ini file's prices ...") was to show that getting the prices back into the bazaar is not necessarily the "hack" that anybody should be concerned with, because uploading the prices (even thousands at once) takes less than a minute to do manually.

The more important hack (as I think you were touching on) is being able to quickly pull all of the current prices from the /baz. This seems to require some form of packet sniffing or memory reading. Packet sniffing and memory reading seem to be used by fan sites that DBG supports and are processes that don't concern Angahra and many other players.

I don't think this is really affecting anybody negatively, except for a handful of sellers who, dare I say, are too lazy to update their prices as often as the market demands. In fact, for buyers using the /baz, this is a great thing! If you want to be a good seller, you should expect to watch the /baz 24/7 and adjust your prices constantly.

I believe, from my own /baz experience, that there are enough people like @dawdle (above), that have so much stock and in-game wealth that they can and will always undercut you. Unless you are willing to drop a significant amount of cash on the game, I do not think you will come close to their level of in-game wealth, even six-box autobot farming 24/7.

If anything, I think you might be grateful that they are automating their undercuts. At least this way, you don't have to check back every 30 minutes to see if they made a manual change - now you can wait a few minutes and adjust as needed. You will keep lowering your price until you reach his bottom. The fact that he may have far more stock and wealth than you, and may be willing to go much lower than you, really doesn't change just because he is able to update prices faster. Just lower yours by more, if you don't want to do it as often.

But I feel it's important to repeat this so I'm not misunderstood: I do think DBG creates an unfair playing field by allowing this type of automation in practice, while making more "honest" players feel guilty or avoid the automation altogether by publishing confusing, vague, unenforced rules. That is bad, but that is on DBG.

I think the reality is that Internet games, at least as publishers present them to us, are not secure. We can get mad, we can blame DBG, we can blame players...but it's not going to change. You can't offer the promise of letting people play alone, in their homes, "Free to Play Your Way®", and not expect people to do just that.